


all i've ever known is how to hold my own

by quantumoddity



Series: Widomauk Courtesan AU [7]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Courtesan AU, Heavy Angst, M/M, Trans Male Character, Trans Mollymauk Tealeaf, courtesan mollymauk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 15:57:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16287521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumoddity/pseuds/quantumoddity
Summary: Mollymauk is faced with what he's left behind and what he has ahead of him, as he's going through gifts from his old clients.One old client in particular. The one who is the unknowing father of his baby. The one whose heart he broke and broke his own heart in turn.And all because of a necklace.





	all i've ever known is how to hold my own

Mollymauk was tired. 

He’d been tired for a very long time. Pretty much ever since he’d arrived here in the village of Foamside. But maybe even before that, maybe since he’d left Zadash or since he’d realised he was pregnant against everything he’d thought to be possible. 

Maybe he’d always been tired. He always did seem to have a heavy weight on his shoulders; the weight of not knowing. Not knowing how to get around even a village as small as this one, as unfamiliar as it’s many alleyways and twisting cobbled streets were, the whole town slanted and twisted and warped as if by time and the sea like driftwood. Not knowing if he’d have enough money to build a life for his son or how to take care of such a small baby. Not knowing what was happening to his friends, who had always felt much more like his family, back in a Zadash that was becoming increasingly hostile to people like them. 

Not knowing if one day, he’d wake up with a blank mind once more, no longer knowing where he was or who he was. Everything gone with no warning at all; not even remembering his sweet little boy. 

Not even  _ him.  _

But Mollymauk did everything he could to live like that wasn’t a possibility, he always had. He acted as if everything was fine, as if he didn’t have any troubles at all, as if the weight on his shoulders just didn’t exist. 

Fortunately, finding his feet in Foamside and starting to pull himself together, drawing up plans for how he was going to make this work for Trinket, was occupying so much of his time and energy that he scarcely had enough space in his brain to give in to any of the deep pits that littered his mind like pockmarks. 

Mollymauk was nothing if he wasn’t an optimist. He’d been given very little choice to be anything else. 

But it was certainly proving useful. He’d only arrived a short week ago and, after feeling like he was going to scream if he needed to stay loafing around the inside of this empty cottage a single second longer, he’d already gone on a frantic cleaning spree and realised that the ground floor of the place could be turned into a store. 

Molly had noticed so many travellers passing through this collection of oddball stores groaning with antiques and inns that seemed to be populated purely by locals and collections of slowly rotting rowboats down on the shoreline. Several had gotten off at the coach station the same night he did, with the confident, purposeful air of those who knew exactly where they were going and what the next day would hold. Mollymauk remembered envying them and their certain futures as he’d curled tighter around his three day old son in his arms and anxiously tried to remember Marion’s instructions to her summer home. 

Molly knew exactly how to win people over, how to use gentle twists of his words to give customers ideas that weren’t even their own and winkle the money from their pockets. It’s what he’d been doing for- quite literally- as long as he could remember and surely selling potion ingredients and small healing patches and other adventuring paraphernalia couldn’t be as hard as selling sex and the deliberately marked up drinks at the brothel’s bar?

But opening a store required money and a premises. The latter he had, thanks to Marion. It was the former that was Mollymauk’s first hurdle. 

He still had some of his wages though saving up hadn’t really been on his mind back when he was a famed and lauded courtesan, basically a prince in the slightly sordid underworld of Zadash, with nothing to stop him indulging his hedonistic streak. Certainly no awareness that he’d find himself here in a nearly completely unfamiliar town with a son to take care of and provide for. It had been a depressing, bitter reminder, when he’d looked at his finances and found them almost non-existent, of how woefully unprepared he was to be a father.  

Marion had of course tried to press money on him as he’d left, even sneaking bags of coins into his trunk as he’d tearfully packed up what little possessions were actually his and not the property of the brothel. Molly had stayed resolute, taking it all out and leaving it pointedly on the counter, the two of them ending up in a frustrating, unacknowledged game of hide and seek. 

Mollymauk had gotten himself into this mess and, besides, he already owed Marion far too much. She hadn’t just given him a home and an income and a bed, ever since she’d found him drinking dazedly in the bar with no concept who he was or where he’d come from, with nothing but a splitting headache and dirt under his nails. Marion had given him a mother. She’d given him a constant feeling of love and support. Mollymauk didn’t remember anything of his past life but he had a strong gut feeling that this was the first time he’d ever had anything close to a family. 

The best thing he could do was take her example and pass it on to his son. He didn’t want any more than that. 

Fortunately, he hadn’t frittered away  _ everything  _ he’d gotten at the brothel. 

Mollymauk moved quietly as he set the trunk he’d travelled with on the kitchen table and flicked open the large, brass clasps. Trinket was finally asleep after hours and hours of colicky wailing and he didn’t want to wake him. 

He hummed to himself as he worked, mostly to fill the empty, dark space around him. The moon was framed almost perfectly in the window, hanging suspended in a black velvet sky above a dull grey sea, calmly continuing it’s constant push and pull along the beach even as the whole of Foamside slept. 

Everyone but Molly. 

He knew he should be asleep, part of him was desperate to crash onto the slightly musty but still very comfortable bed just by Trinket’s cradle and snatch as much sleep as he could before his son’s sniffles and splutters woke them both up again in a depressingly short space of time. 

But he knew he was too wound up for sleep. Too many things to do. Too much pulling at his attention. And he was still shaking off the nocturnal habits he’d picked up at the brothel. 

So he was finishing the last bits of unpacking, pulling out various tissue wrapped parcels from the depths of his trunk. Some tinkled like bells, some made the soft whispering noise of silk on silk, some rustled like tiny sacks of rice as he laid them all on the table and marked them neatly with a piece of chalk. Each one was given an address, a name, a pre-agreed upon price to be carried around town the next day and exchanged for the gold, silver and copper he’d been promised for each by various shopkeepers around the town. 

Since he’d arrived and had his grand idea to open a store, Mollymauk had been wandering up and down the main streets of Foamside with Trinket tucked into a little sling around his front, learning the layout of the town and making deals with all the relevant people, following hundreds of confusing instructions from locals whose thick accents he was still getting used to, zigzagging across the town from store to store, killing two birds with one stone. 

Being a famous courtesan had come with it’s perks. As he’d worked his way up to the lauded position he’d held and lounged there prettily, being passed from lord to lady to prince to princess to dignitary to judge to magnate to whoever the hell else cared to own him for a night, he’d been given a great many expensive and extravagant gifts. Lingerie made of the finest, sheerest silks, enough jewels to make a dragon envious, exotic scents and vials of lube and moisturiser, even elaborately carved figures in a variety of erotic poses or hand crafted sex toys in wood, glass, metal and ivory. He’d all found it a little silly back in Zadash, how these people would vie for his attention, shower him with these presents to win his favour that seemed impossibly expensive to him but had probably barely put a dent in his client’s vast amounts of wealth, when every single one of them would pretend not to know him in the daylight. As if he was just a think that they could hang jewels and silks on, a mannequin to display their own wealth and importance. 

It had felt like a puerile little game to Molly, back then. Now it made his stomach twist a little. 

But that didn’t matter. What mattered now was that he could take all these gifts and sell them on, getting his start in this town. He mumbled a small prayer of thanks to the idiocy of the aristocracy as he pulled out the last of the packages. 

Altogether, it would be enough, enough to renovate the bottom floor into a proper store and buy the first round of stock. What happened from then on was entirely in his hands but it was a start. That was all he needed, a start, a chance. 

Mollymauk had everything laid out on the bed, ready to be packed up for tomorrow. Maybe he and Trinket would have a little extra to buy some more of those pastries from the bakery. There’d been nothing like it in Zadash, eating them hot right from the bag as they’d sat together on the sand, watching the waves, and Trinket had crowed happily as he’d licked powdered sugar off his daddy’s fingertip. 

Molly was about to put the trunk away before his heart lurched like the waves breaking outside. 

One of the packages must have caught on something and torn, revealing the metallic, glittering innards. Gold mostly, heavy chains, expensive and ostentatious. But there was a single thread of silver in amongst it, much thinner and simpler than the others. Mollymauk told himself he was only going to nudge it back into place and bind the parcel up tighter and shove it out of his sight and out of his mind. But instead he hooked that thin silver chain free and held it up to the light. 

He’d almost forgotten it. He’d almost let it go. 

If he hadn’t noticed it there, if it had just gone to the jewellers with the rest of it, this unassuming necklace with tiny, black opal moons and stars that had once been a part of his heart, would he have remembered it suddenly somewhere down the line? 

Molly knew this was what he was supposed to want, to slowly forget how it had felt to be held by him and kissed by him and how different it had been than it ever was with any of his other clients, how his heart had fluttered when he’d first fastened this necklace for him, gently holding his hair back and telling him how beautiful it looked. It wouldn’t do Molly any good to want him back or to dwell on what they’d had, it would be a uniquely painful form of self-inflicted torture. The best thing to do, the only sensible thing to do, would be to sell this necklace along with the rest of it. It wasn’t even worth much in comparison to the extravagant gold and eyeball sized jewels of all the other gifts. 

But somehow, the idea of losing it was twisting Molly’s insides more than he could bear. 

It hadn’t needed to cost as much. It hadn’t needed to be flashy or gaudy. 

It had come from Caleb. It had been the most precious thing he’d ever given him, until Trinket was born. 

Sighing, cursing himself, Molly slid the necklace into the pocket of his tunic. He could feel it’s presence the whole time he was sliding the trunk back into the wardrobe and putting the parcels into his pack for tomorrow, almost as of the chain were made of iron rather than whisper thin silver. 

He moved from the humble little kitchen that he’d determinedly ingrained with the smells of baking and cookies (it had taken three attempts until he managed not to burn them) and down the short hallway to the bedroom. There had been enough in the cottage for Trinket to have his own room, a nursery of sorts, but neither of them had been happy with being out of each other’s eyelines for very long. So the tiny little half tiefling had a cradle set up next to the bed, a hand me down from Marion that it melted Molly’s heart to think had once held baby Jester. He would use it for a few hours before he started fidgeting and whimpering and reaching out for his daddy, Molly pouncing eagerly and bringing him into the safety of his blankets, tucked up against his chest like his arms alone would be enough to shield him from the rest of the world. 

But there was a mobile on it, a reaching hand with various sewn and stuffed sea creatures hanging from each finger. It was cute so he’d left it up and Trinket seemed to like it. He’d try to grab it and his stubby tail would swish this way and that and bunch up all his blankets. Moving slowly and carefully so he didn’t knock the whole thing and jerk his poor, sniffly little baby awake, Molly looped the necklace around the stem of the mobile and let it dangle, the moons and stars hanging there like a perfect negative of the real one outside the window. 

Trinket was soundly asleep so Molly could take a long, sweet few moments to study his face. It was so beautiful, he still found it difficult to believe it was real. He had a brushing of freckles across a little snub nose and perfect little lavender lips that his tiny rosebud tongue was currently poking out of slightly. His horns were just tiny bumps on his forehead but they’d grow. All of him would grow. Trinket would become a fully-fledged person with his own hopes and dreams and a whole, long, turbulent future.

Molly wiped the tear away before it could slide off the bridge of his nose. He kissed his fingertips and lightly pressed them to his son’s forehead before he turned away to finally give himself over to a death like sleep. 

The necklace stayed on the mobile, turning with the ghost of momentum, catching the moonlight every so often. Molly knew he couldn’t keep it. He couldn’t keep a hold of those memories without burning himself and prolonging the pain. 

But Trinket could. He deserved at least a little something of his papa. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please please leave a comment, it really means a lot and so many of you have already left the nicest comments ever on this series and others and it fuels my soul.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr! I'm @mollymauk-teafleak and I also write TAZ, Hamilton and Ari & Dante fic


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